Inter-cell interference (ICI) is a data-dependent noise and is detrimental to the reliability of data stored in flash memory. To mitigate/cancel ICI, conventional approaches often use the amount of interference caused by the programming of aggressor cells to be determined/estimated as interference parameters under an ICI model. These interference parameters may be estimated offline by measuring voltage threshold distributions of the victim cells conditioned upon aggressor patterns. Estimation can be done through dedicated characterization procedures of the flash where the estimated parameters are then configured as a set of static values in a system for ICI mitigation. However, ICI parameters may vary throughout the life of a solid state drive (SSD). Furthermore, ICI parameters may vary across different pages/blocks/dies of flash memory. A set of pre-defined ICI parameters may not provide optimal results.
It would be desirable to implement a method for estimating interference parameters on-demand to mitigate ICI.